Acting Worship (Pt. 4)

Imagining Honestly

So, let’s use our imaginations.

I mean ”use our imaginations” both in the sense of imagining solutions to our division, but also that imagination is the solution to our division. Imagination is the place where the traditional and the innovative are inseparable. The “play” of imagination is where we marry the old to the new.

Worship that is both Traditional and Contemporary is about imagination. It is about, for that hour on Sunday, pretending that God’s promise for the completion of the world is already here. But don’t let the word “pretend” throw you. When we pretend faithfully, God makes good on his promise and provides the very reality we are playing at. A theologian might say that we “incarnate the Eschaton.” Sunday morning worship gives us the precious chance to act like we’re living in the Kingdom of Heaven. We don’t often get to do that during the rest of the week.

In certain substance abuse recovery groups, one might hear this idea as, “fake it till you make it.”

Like it or not, worship is a ritual. Worship is a kind of community performance. Whether there are sensors and kneelers and candles or whether there are video screens and drums and spot-lights, worship is a ritual we perform. Our particular community, our particular culture shapes what that ritual looks like. Sometimes, our ritual is to tell ourselves we don’t have rituals. That’s what a philosopher would call “modernism.”

“But,” you might be thinking, “imagining, pretending, performing and acting are all fake. They are all fictional. They aren’t real.” The Contemporary will especially feel this way, right? Worship shouldn’t be a performance. It shouldn’t be inauthentic. Worship should be true!

Who says that good performances aren’t true?

Let’s take a look at another kind of performance. One that isn’t so stuffed full of our emotions. Let’s look at acting, like on a stage or in a movie.

Good acting is about “living honestly in the given circumstance .” The ‘given circumstance’ is just the script. It tells you both what to say and when to say it. It tells you where the scene takes place. It tells you what goes on in the scene.

The ‘living honestly’ is the courageous task of the actor. We’ve all seen someone who isn’t up to the challenge, right? The words that leave their lips are hollow. The way they hold their body or the way they gesture seems not-quite-right.

But we’ve also encountered the brilliant performance of an exceptional actor. Most recently, I think of Heath Ledger in “The Dark Knight” or Daniel Day Lewis in…well, come to think of it, in just about everything. What is going on there that gives us such joy? What do they do that lets us in on the Truth of the story?

On the one hand, they provide us the satisfaction of getting what we paid for. Heath Ledger’s Joker has the face paint and the scary laugh and the flamboyant clothes. We know we’re going to get that from a Batman movie. It comforts us to receive it. It would make us anxious and upset if he never walked on screen in the purple suit and smudged grease paint.

This is what the Traditional values. It desires to know we know where we are. There are familiar words and symbols that help us feel like a part of a community. Like a part of a shared story. It lets us know that when we invest our hearts into Church, we aren’t going to be deceived or left out in the cold. The sight of stained glass and the sound of the organ let me know I’m home.

On the other hand, great performances delight us with innovations and surprises. Ledger’s Joker transforms a character we thought we knew so well. He speaks with the flat, familiar monotone of a Midwesterner. He reveals a horrifying kind of intelligence. We appreciate that he surprises us, because that makes him more than a type. It makes him alive. It makes him ring true.

This is what the Contemporary provides to the performance of our worship. It toys with our expectations to remind us that our Faith is alive. It provides us with the delight of surprise . It shines light on new aspects of our Faith that we might have been underemphasizing. At worst, what we might have been ignoring. A new kind of musical instrument can evoke a new metaphor for God’s power or love. A new word or phrase can open up possibilities we hadn’t discovered.

But in the excellent performance, both of these things happen at once. We are both reassured by our fulfilled expectations and delighted by our surprise. Like when an old hymn suddenly finds new meaning because of our circumstances. Like when a new metaphor illuminates a familiar passage of scripture. This is the tension between the old and the new that siding only with the Traditional or the Contemporary against the other is guaranteed to miss. The Traditional and the Contemporary cannot be separated, even if we so easily distinguish between them.